


Hear My Secret (Close Your Eyes)

by gyuhan



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: (if you've seen bad clue then you know what those trigger warnings are about), (influenced by bad clue but nobody's related here obv), Alternate Universe - Bad Clue, Alternate Universe - Home Run MV, Enemies to Lovers, Fake-Out Make-Out, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Life Debt, M/M, On the Run
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:33:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27089443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gyuhan/pseuds/gyuhan
Summary: "I think I can hear them getting closer... Maybe a few more doors down. What do we do now?"A cart rattles from somewhere out in the corridor of the train, an unfamiliar voice cursing in a rough accent—such a foul mouth—and Jeonghan doesn’t have time to think. Mingyu’s tie crumples under the death grip Jeonghan captures it in and he tugs on it hard, all that adrenaline pumping through him, until his back hits something solid and he brings Mingyu stumbling along with him. Mingyu makes a sharp, startled noise, catches himself with one hand above Jeonghan’s head on the wall of the compartment room, and then they're pressed close. Mingyu glances down at Jeonghan’s lips before he looks like he's about to say something, only then—a thud outside the room, the door about to be opened.Jeonghan hisses out, "Play along," and pulls Mingyu in.
Relationships: Kim Mingyu/Yoon Jeonghan
Comments: 5
Kudos: 51





	1. Hear My Secret (Close Your Eyes)

**Author's Note:**

> i saw the bad clue episodes of going seventeen, the teasers for home run, and [this super gorgeous gyuhan fanart](https://twitter.com/YNAT5oaaf9Ky5LR/status/1317848839726854149?s=20) and admittedly went a little wild in my google docs. i should probably just post everything i write as i go or i'll never finish _anything_ , so here's this. i'm hoping to keep this under 25k... pray for me.
> 
> important note: this is _influenced_ by bad clue and the home run mv, not about them. this means that kim mingyu is still kim mingyu, yoon jeonghan is still yoon jeonghan, and they aren't diamond thieves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING: upon my rereading of this, i noticed that the situations being written from jeonghan's younger perspective might make it seem as if his mother was in an abusive relationship, but that's not the case. she was being followed by debt collectors, then she met the chairman and became his mistress, which in turn gave her the funds to afford better things for jeonghan. i didn't want to make the text of the fic itself more clear because jeonghan didn't exactly know what was going on with his mother back then. his impression of the past is intentionally vague in the way it always is when you're a kid watching adults go through struggles and i want to keep his perspective realistic. but just a heads up for anyone who might read this!
> 
> jeonghan's song for this chapter is [locket by crumb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPVb7K3bklY)

When Jeonghan first felt hatred like acid pooling in his gut, he was shaking the hand of the man responsible for keeping his mother from flatlining on a hospital bed. He was selling his soul for a promise, for security. Eyes wide shut, his mouth pulled up on the reflex of manners. He lied, _Thank you for doing this, Chairman Kim,_ and told the truth, _I’d never be able to do this without you, sir._

The blood was the first sign. The blood got all over everything: the braided band of a yellow gold ring that ensnared itself around his mother’s finger—the wrong finger for it to really mean something—the tiny pools of blood blotting out the thin, reaching childhood scar that climbed from his mother’s thumb to the fine bone of her wrist, the tiny gemstones stuck to her perfectly maintained nails. On her hands was the first sign that there was something collapsing inside her body, like a star burning so hot that it explodes as it dies, leaving nothing but a black hole to disembowel the light from whatever is left in its wake.

As a boy, callow and short-sighted, Jeonghan could never fit the pieces together the right way.

His father’s portrait was left wrapped in newspaper in a cardboard box. His mother packed their things every few months. She came home well after the stores shut down for the night and when Jeonghan was long ago in bed. His mother dressed in red, in sequins, painted herself in thick creams and lotions of lavender perfume. She kept her hair short but would always brush her fingers over the photos she kept of herself as a girl with hair down well past her shoulders. His mother pulled him away from men and crossed the street whenever she’d see one. His mother loved him more than she loved herself.

A day he recalled often was one of many Children’s Days wherein he tugged at his mother’s robe so hard it startled her from her people watching on the porch. She flicked the bud of her cigarette with the painted nail of her thumb and asked, _What’s the matter?_ He held up a magazine he’d taken from her side of the living room, the cover pulled back to show a page in the back. _Can I have one of these Gundams, Mom?_ He pointed and poked at the action figure on the glossy page and his mother’s face fell. _No, honey, but you can play a little longer outside today, okay? Doesn’t that sound nice?_

When Jeonghan entered middle school, an older sunbae came to him before classes began. Jeonghan’s stomach rolled, the sick, slippery feeling he always felt around older boys, around men, burrowing itself into his gut. Then the boy crept closer, a hand covering the cruel twist of his mouth, and asked, _Was that really your mother who dropped you off?_

Jeonghan hadn’t known anger yet, but he knew fear. He’d seen it often in the face of his mother, in her shaking hands and snake’s trail of cigarette smoke. He hid his hands under the desk, pressed his palms to his thighs, and promised himself he wouldn’t allow the tremors to show. The nurse gave him a cot to rest on in the infirmary for the rest of the day, let him prick his finger just how his mother taught him to do whenever he felt sick. His ears rung from the laughter of the older boy as he lay with his hands folded and interlocked over his eyes.

Later that year, after another move, his mother surprised him on Children’s Day. He stopped asking for things years before, so when from behind her back she held up two Gundam figures, he didn’t know how to react. Jeonghan had learned to think of himself as older than he was. At twelve, he saw himself as seventeen. He didn’t need a toy, because those were things younger kids played with. He didn’t need homemade meals, he was old enough to find food himself. He didn’t need to be with his mom all the time, only children hated being alone.

Saying the words, _I don’t like stuff like that anymore, Mom,_ felt like swallowing glass. He didn’t flinch. He’d had worse things happen to him than that, had seen the remnants of harsher cruelties. Besides, he’d gotten better at lying in school. He almost couldn’t tell the difference between what he said and what he felt anymore.

In the months that followed after that, his mother moved them out of the creaking rooftop apartment they’d been living in and into something wider, warmer, and much more clean. He wasn’t used to walls that weren’t stained yellow from packs of cigarettes being chain smoked inside, or a faucet that warmed his body almost the second his bare feet touched the tiles. The windows were the most difficult thing to get used to. He was used to one, maybe two, but in that shiny new apartment he was surrounded by windows, couldn’t move through the rooms without being swamped in the warmth of sunlight. He only ever opened the curtain in his bedroom at night.

They hadn’t moved far, so he shouldn’t have had to change schools so long as he woke up two hours earlier to catch a bus, but still his mother enrolled him into a new school anyway. She’d been clutching his hands and crying as she told him, saying, _I’m going to take good care of you now, Jeonghan-ah, I promise. Mom is so sorry for everything._

The school was big, difficult to navigate, and always bustling with students even long after classes had officially ended. People there stayed behind to study more and only went home around the same time his mother used to come back to all those old apartments, with all those sequins, those stained lips. He started staying late to study like all the other kids that packed themselves into the library like a can stuffed full of sardines. It was nice to be around so many quiet people. He hadn’t realized how much he’d liked just sitting in silence, scratching at notebooks with his pen while in the presence of other people his age doing the same thing as him. He felt so… normal, as though laughter no longer haunted him everywhere in school.

Being told that he’d made it to the top of his class didn’t make him feel anything in particular. People clapped politely for him and when he spoke to his homeroom teacher in the teachers’ office afterward, all he could do was nod and let his thoughts fade into the background, working on autopilot. He could never make eye contact with his homeroom teacher. He was a man.

 _You’re doing very well, Jeonghan. If you keep these grades up, you’d certainly be on the right track to place at number one in the whole school._ He nodded. _I’m very proud of you even despite all your earlier struggles acclimating. Oh, and your mother called me._ He nodded. _She told me to tell you her congratulations and that you have a gift at home for everything you’ve achieved so far. How about you give yourself a break today and skip self study? I think you deserve it._ He nodded.

The phone was still wrapped in a colorful gift paper when he got home. He slipped his backpack slowly off his shoulder, strap hanging off his fingers until it kissed the floor. For a long while, he stared at that space where the gift sat like a bomb to diffuse. He knew he should feel happy, but a churning in his gut rooted him in place like a slap to the face. He didn’t like when his mother gave him gifts, or bought him better things, and there wasn’t any reason for it. He was fourteen and scared of presents in the exact same way he was scared of older men. He wasn’t used to them, and so he feared them.

Before Jeonghan started high school, over that short month of summer break, he met a man as he was heading to the apartment. He wasn’t supposed to be there—neither of them were. Jeonghan knew without knowing that his mother never wanted them to meet each other. He chose summer school, chose to spend time taking long walks that winded around parks and unfamiliar neighborhoods, studying in cafés with the allowance his mother gave him. He’d left school planning to go to a café, but he’d forgotten his wallet and he had to buy the cheapest coffee at the café or he’d get kicked out. And then there was an older man, old enough to be his grandfather, walking his way from the end of the hall where only his and his mother’s door was.

The cologne hit him first, a thick wave of it smashing him in the face, his skin prickling, and then the puzzle pieces spilled out onto the floor before him, and all at once he understood. The oddest thing, though, was the way he phased right passed the older man, moving by him without pause. He went inside his home, grabbed his wallet, and went to study. His mother didn’t hear him enter, nor did she hear him leave.

High school went by like a film reel, snapshots of textbooks, black coffee, end of the year gifts, his head down, and his hands steady.

College saw him in his own apartment near the campus. One of the SKY universities. A set of car keys turning over in his hands. Boyfriends he couldn’t keep for longer than a few months, always dumped after the littlest thing blew up into scathing comments about his feelings, or lack of them, and his stunted personality. He did nothing but study, but fuck, and there was never a moment where he was truly open with himself. His boyfriends always wanted something he couldn’t give them, not the way they wanted, and so his phone calls with his mother got longer and his social circle shrunk to the woman who worked at the library he frequented and a group chat of all the students in his major.

He graduated in seven years. When it was over, he didn’t know how to be himself. He only ever studied, worked himself over problems he knew the answers to over and over again till his wrists were aching and his head hurt, and without that he floundered, struggled to keep his head over water. He did nothing for a year of his life.

Then, at lunch with his mother, she coughed up blood over the back of her hand and onto her plate of French cuisine.

The hospital visit lasted for hours, was nerve-racking, and one hand shook as he hid it behind his back, but the other hand he held his mother’s in was steady. He kept kissing the back of her hand, brushing her hair, caring for her the way she did him all those years when she’d come into his room when he should’ve been sleeping and caressed his face in a soft, warm palm.

The news shook him, upended all of the files in his head of things he knew and left him with nothing but tears in his eyes and a sick burn in his throat as he left the bathroom that night.

The chairman came two days later as his mother slept fitfully in her private room in the hospital. An air purifier puffed in a corner, a TV played old classics in black and white, and Jeonghan sat with his head in his hands on a chaise lounge he’d scrapped across the floor to be five feet from his mother’s bed.

This man he knew only by face, only slightly aged from when he first saw him when he was two months away from fifteen. Over a decade had passed but the scent that smudge itself all over his lungs was still the same when the man came to stand beside his mother’s bed, rubbing at his mouth from a foot away from him. _You know who I am, don’t you?_ On autopilot, eyes down, he nodded. Chairman Kim was the name the doctors kept mentioning. _That’s good. This will take less time, then. I’ll pay for your mother’s treatments, Mr. Yoon, but I want you to come work for me. I’ve seen your records, your mother’s debt, and I think this could be a very beneficial transaction, wouldn’t you agree? Go on, look at me, boy. Will you do something to help or not?_

Jeonghan said, _I’d never be able to do this without you, sir,_ and knew that he really couldn’t. Not unless he had help of some kind. Someone to stand beside him, that’s honestly all he needed. Just… someone on his side. Someone who would understand him.

When he meets Kim Mingyu, Mingyu doesn’t stand beside him. Not at first, at least. Not without a struggle. Kim Mingyu knocks him to the ground, robs the breath from the cradle of his lungs, then offers him a hand back up again, a little smile. _Sorry._

That’s all it takes. That hand, reaching out over the distance. Then a heavy briefcase, the grey cloud of smoke trailing a train with two stowaways, plum purple skies covering two bodies in night’s shadowed blanket, and the final release from everything once seizing him—all except for that hand, still grasping his, and his hand grasps back, steady and strong.


	2. Don't Forget (Open Your Eyes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is mingyu's chapter about his past which is influenced by bad clue, so it's very heavy. this whole story isn't going to be this way, but i felt it would be a disservice to his character not to give a better flushed out background to his mental health than what bad clue did (however, mingyu doesn't have dissociative identity disorder in this because i thought the handling of it in bad clue was ableist and i don't have any experience with it). mingyu has ptsd and night terrors.
> 
> POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNINGS, in order: there's a car accident where mingyu's mother witnesses a man be killed. mingyu's father's alcoholism and shared past childhood abuse with mingyu's uncle are mentioned. mingyu's father's suicide is described in a way that doesn't directly mention what happens and mingyu has flashbacks to it. mingyu performs a traditional funeral method in which he prepares his father's body to be laid to rest. general guilt over parental deaths. night terrors are described.
> 
> mingyu's song for this chapter is [don't forget to open your eyes by missio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA6jtaUyfjo).

Mingyu used to sleep once, he knew. He had to have, or where else did the prayers come from?

His father was Christian. Not originally, not as a boy, but he was after he met his wife. He had converted for her right around the time when her stomach began to swell, building something inside itself to keep Mingyu safe before he was ready to come out. Mingyu came early, very early, when the hospital bags were still unpacked, the ancestral crib put up until the servants would need to get it from the storage rooms, the nursery floor covered in tarp, swatches of different shades of green on the walls.

His mom was only supposed to look at pretty things when she was pregnant with him. If she didn’t, she thought, then it would affect her baby. Her mother told her so when she was younger, and her mother’s mother said the same. So she exercised, she ate fruit without any bruises, she slept as much as she could. She had nothing to interrupt the serenity of her mind. She had security in Mingyu’s father, whose family was rich, and she had a companion in her step-mother, who took her on walks when Mingyu’s father was away on business trips. All her thoughts were calm and were happy. Or they should’ve been. She wanted them to be.

When she was six months along, excited to see her husband become a father, his mother saw a man walking across the street one day, one very bright, head-aching day. The man held in his hands a newspaper, jerked his head up once and then down again, staring at those printed words, images of politicians shaking hands on the cover, which he’d folded back to look instead at the columns on the last page. The color red, flashing from across the street like _please stop_ , and the man’s head down, eyes glued to the paper, pulling a pen from behind his ear to circle a job listing, clicking the pen twice with restless fingers; he was young, college-age, and a part-time job would’ve been perfect for him. When Mingyu’s mother screamed it was drowned out by the sound of screeching tires, tail break, bone break. Right in front of his mother’s eyes.

Five pounds, small enough to be held in his father’s hands. That’s how Mingyu was born. Stress induced labor, two days after his mother saw a man be hit by a car. That’s who Mingyu was named after. That dead man. His mother felt responsible, somehow, for the man’s death even when she’d been on the opposite side of the street. That was the kind of person she was, and Mingyu’s father told him so whenever something made him smile, selfless acts always a reminder of her.

When he was a boy, only eleven, that was the first and last time he’d heard that story. His father’s tears drying on his face, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off the rest that wanted to see the light. Mingyu didn’t know how to react, or that he should react at all in the first place. He saw his father sitting beside him, crying, still wearing the suit Mingyu’s grandmother had given to him that morning with a kiss to the cheek, a palm curving comfortingly over her son’s stubbly jaw. Mingyu’s own suit was uncomfortable, rumpled like it’d been forgotten to be steamed, and badly creased at the knees, the elbows. Around his neck, Mingyu wore a necklace. His mother’s wedding ring hanging from the chain, engraved with the words, _I want to be your last._

They were stories Mingyu only knew in the periphery. He’d heard, but not seen. But there was one story he’d seen and been unable to see ever since.

When Mingyu was seventeen, his father was an alcoholic. Not in a way you’d notice, in a way that would alarm suspicion. From a young age his father had been trained how to hide pain, his uncle too. The Kim siblings had a rule, instilled in them by their father: what burdens others must not be told. He was a businessman, had wanted to work his way up the ladder rather than be placed atop it by birth. Every outing, every meeting, was met with drinks, poured by subordinates, pushed at him by seniors. Mingyu knew, in the way you always sort of know, but he didn’t want to see it, so he kept his eyes closed. A habit he had, one that he only broke after seeing _it_. His dad… that night. His dad, there and not. His dad, just a body then. And then every night after, every time he closed his eyes, he saw it again, relived it again, that moment, that night, his dad.

Another suit, then. Steamed this time, by his uncle’s orders to the maids. His grandmother never touched his cheek, but she did stand beside him at the service while they both shook hands with guests. His grandparents were traditionalists and he was the first son, the chief mourner. A smooth transition, that’s what his job was for his father. Make it a smooth transition into the next life. Mingyu washed his father in incense, held his hands close as he trimmed the nails on his fingers, coins placed, cotton stuffed, rice swallowed, then a quilted form placed carefully into a coffin. Mingyu wept openly, the whole time, and his uncle stood against a wall, covering his face with a clammy hand. They didn’t speak a word, couldn’t speak, not with all that sorrow stealing the air from the room.

In traditional funerals, the first son has committed a crime against heaven: his father died and he let him. He found him. In that room, those curtains wide open, lights switched off, the moon and the stars the only other audience to the flooding grief. Signs, everywhere, and he knew. And he found him, his father, after he’d long since joined his mother.

Night terrors came fast, a razor’s edge of sharpness to them each time. His throat raw, pillow wet, sheets ripping under the clawing of his fingers. His limbs kept getting away from him, carrying him out into hallways in his sleep, and then forgetting, until told the next day about what he’d been doing. He heard things sometimes, saw things in other times. Mostly he just screamed until he couldn’t anymore. Tucked into the western wing of the mansion, the wing where only his late parents and him had occupied, he could scream for minutes on end before being woken up.

Visits from many different men, blurring together, all giving him something new, telling him something new, until they were all saying the same things. Did they help? He didn’t know.

His grandfather was disgusted by him. His grandmother couldn’t be in the same room as him or she’d lose her breath. He looked just like his father, he knew. He’d been told so ever since he had scraped knees, messy hair, and crooked teeth. As a boy, anyone could tell exactly who his father was even in a crowd of fifty other men. That didn’t change as he grew older, as he shook off the premature stunting and overtook his dad’s height. His mother only gave him his sharp smile and those beauty marks in the exact same places she had. A mark behind the ear, on the nose, and right there on his cheek like a kiss good morning, a kiss good night, a kiss goodbye.

He was his parents’ only son, the chief mourner, and no one could stand to look at him. Mingyu wished for a long time to be the same, to be able to close his eyes whenever he saw himself. But then those images, flashing behind his lids: the night a shadow over his back, filmy curtains pushed wide, moonlight streaming in and falling over everything, glinting off everything, illuminating _everything_. He kept his eyes open for years.

At nineteen, Mingyu found himself in university. Yonsei University, the same university his father attended. He also had a new man handing him new medication, listening this time instead of telling him. Better was the word he’d use for how he’d been. He moved out of the family mansion temporarily and into the dorms of his university.

His roommates—two a year younger than him and one the same age—didn’t flinch when he told them that he had a sleep disorder. One of them, who was there on a scholarship from Jeju, had been insistent that it was alright and that he knew just what to do if Mingyu started sleepwalking, because his baby cousin had the same thing growing up.

Mingyu still took sleeping pills but knew they didn’t always stop the screaming just before waking, so he’d started sleeping on his stomach with his face in his pillow to muffle any sounds he might’ve made. It was easier when other people were near him, though. It was something he’d never considered before. In the mansion, he was entirely alone in a ghost wing, him the only inhabitant. Tens of doors with empty beds behind each one except for his. The presence of another person could make it easier to handle.

Over the next three years, the night terrors began to settle. His psychiatrist said his nervous system was beginning to mend itself from the trauma he’d experienced. His psychologist said he’d been confronting his past in recent sessions, that it helped. His friends said he must just feel comfortable with them.

Mingyu didn’t think it was any of that. He thought it was the anger that pushed the rest of it back. The single minded determination to get revenge.

Over the years, Mingyu had taken up a new hobby to occupy himself with when he wasn’t studying business marketing. Puzzles.

Around middle school, Mingyu had been fascinated by a toy one of his friends had unearthed from deep within her backpack, chucking it out from underneath her notebooks so that it hit Mingyu square on the chest. His hands flailed, caught it before it could fall. A Rubik's Cube. He didn’t set it down for the rest of free period, constantly fiddling with it, shifting the squares over and over again, trying to see what the trick was. It took two days for him to figure out how to move the colors around in just the right way that he could solve it in under a minute.

Revisiting that love for puzzles in university was a little different, because this time there was no object to hold in his hands, nothing to turn this way and that to try and wrap his head around. Instead, there was something else.

With age and a clearer head than ever before, he’d begun to pick up on some things on his visits back home. The things that he recognized in himself whenever he saw a window with curtains pulled too far apart, he saw in his uncle. His grandfather’s hand going up to get a bill or to call upon a servant would make his uncle freeze. Once, when the power went out at the mansion, his uncle broke a teacup when one of the butlers brought out the old, hard beeswax candles at his grandfather’s request. That one in particular was the spark that sent his mind reeling. His dad had gone just as stiff when Mingyu had been playing with matches and lighting all the scented candles his mother had kept hidden in her closet and only ever used when she was going to soak in the tub.

Mingyu saw the marks on his father when he’d prepared his body to be laid to rest. He knew he’d find the same marks on his uncle if he looked. He just knew.

His grandfather had never been a man he’d idolized, in fact, over the years, he’d begun to resent him for the way he treated him and his father. His father’s passing had been swept under the rug, the truth twisted into something completely unrecognizable to what really happened. _An embarrassment_ , his grandfather had called it. Mingyu had wanted to throw up right there in front of the butler when he’d heard the words. His father, his grandfather's own son, talked about in such a cruel way, right in front of him.

His father, his uncle, they both suffered under his grandfather. He could see it now, clear as day. Puzzle pieces slotting into place like _of course, this is how it’s always been, how didn’t you see it?_

His grandmother had been phasing out of existence, her mind absent, presence diminished, and Mingyu spent many hours during his weekend visits just sitting with her, sometimes going on walks. She’d become so different since he left the mansion, since he’d escaped. She confessed to him on one of her walks, her hands laid carefully over the arm he held out for her, that she knew his grandfather was seeing someone else. A mistress. A young woman, his grandmother said, with a son not that much older than Mingyu. She’d told him, face grim, something in her eyes that he couldn’t decipher, that her husband had been paying for the boy’s schooling for years, and that he’d graduate by the end of the term. Mingyu had clenched his jaw so tight his head ached, the light pounding at his skull and trying to break inside.

She passed away months later in her sleep. Another suit. Pressed. Shaking hands. Rinse and repeat, Mingyu washing the filth off of death in a basin of water then hanging it up to dry until next time.

Without his grandmother at the mansion, he’d stopped visiting on the weekends, wanted to stay far away from it. He knew he couldn’t, that he had to go back by next year, that his twenty-third birthday would be spent once more in that ghost wing, back in his old room with its curtainless windows that nearly touched the ceiling, his ears ringing as he would doubtlessly wake screaming as if he’d been trapped inside a body that wasn’t his.

He’d tried to stay in contact with his uncle, but the phone would just ring, and ring, and ring. And whenever he did finally end up getting someone else’s voice, harried and harsh on the other end of the line, he’d often be on the receiving end of a torrent of hatred. He knew it wasn’t directed at him. It was directed at his father. But Mingyu looked just like his father, had the same voice, and his uncle was stricken with grief, with a frenzied outrage at being the only one left with that man, with Mingyu’s grandfather, in that echoing mansion, those haunted halls.

Graduation day came. One of the family chauffeurs was sent to the dorms to collect him and take him back to the mansion with all his things. The roads shifted passed his eyes too fast to catalogue and he’d rested his forehead against the tinted window, sighing. It felt like he was being shepherded up onto the dais built for his beheading. Like the home he grew up in had become a curse upon him.

There was no fanfare. Mingyu didn’t see his grandfather nor his uncle the entire first week that he was back. He wasn’t alone, though. In the western wing of the mansion, one of the rooms stretched fingers of light out from under the doorway and into the hallway during the night. The door never budged open when Mingyu would check it during the day, almost as if it’d been sealed shut while he was away at university. But sometimes... sometimes he swore he could hear the sound of someone talking from within, muffled through the walls.

It unsettled him. He’d stopped sleeping since he came back to the family home, knowing what would happen if he did. The sting of his throat after shouting all night, the sleepwalking, those images flashing behind his eyes. He prayed the way his parents taught him to every night as he sat at the foot of his bed, but when he laid down he couldn’t close his eyes. He didn’t want to. So he thought maybe he was just beginning to hallucinate things.

Only then does the ghost taking up space in Mingyu’s personal side of hell finally show himself.

Mingyu sees him right there in the hallway and _knows_. He knows exactly who it is. The son of his grandfather’s mistress, insolently standing in the place where his grandmother just passed hardly even a year prior. 

The man is without a shred of shame as he peacocks himself there, absently checking his watch as though his mind is focused elsewhere. He must be planning on going somewhere, Mingyu can tell, but suspects the man will eventually come back once it’s dark so he can mumble behind the door at his back, lights on, driving Mingyu mad.

Mingyu steps forward with wild eyes, sleepless days coloring him ashen, his fingers trembling with rage.

Detest and contempt twist his insides into knots and all Mingyu can do is look the man in the face once he realizes that he’s being watched and say, “You don’t belong here.” Furious and frothing at the mouth for a fight, he takes a few steps nearer to the son of a mistress his grandmother had known about all along, and says, “You don’t belong here and you need to _leave_.”


End file.
